Rahul Bose in Aparna Sen’s ‘The Japanese Wife’

It’s a bitter-sweet love story you could hardly imagine in today’s frenetic world – a man and woman separated by oceans and countries yet married to each other, without having ever physically met. ‘The Japanese Wife’ is as spare as a Haiku, and as beautiful. Recently Rahul Bose was in town for the MIAAC festival premiere of this Aparna Sen movie, which is based on a short story by Kunal Basu.  The film stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen and Chigusa Takaku, and a stellar support cast headed by Moushami Chatterjee.

This atmospheric film, set in a village in Bengal, moves slowly, almost like the river which is so much a part of it, yet it fully draws you on with finely etched characters. The tale revolves around Snehamoy, a non-assuming schoolteacher in a village in the Sunderbans, who has a long distance love marriage with Miyage, a Japanese pen friend in Yokohama. The two never meet yet you feel the strength and the commitment of that love, and are touched by it. The story gets more complicated when Sandhya, a young widow comes to live in the home Snehamoy shares with an aunt.

Filmgoers saw Rahul Bose recently in Onir’s ‘I Am’ and can look forward to seeing him in Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ based on Salman Rushdie’s acclaimed novel. Says Rahul Bose, “It’s one of my top 3 novels of all times – and to be actually in it is surreal – it’s fantastic to be in it and Salman Rushdie has written the script.”

Rahul Bose, consummate actor that he is, absorbs and takes on the coloring of the characters he plays. In ‘The Japanese Wife’ this savvy urbanite becomes the quiet village schoolmaster right down to his Bengali accented English.  He is Snehamoy and you believe in his love for Miyagi and the reality of the world Aparna Sen has woven.

In a Q and A after the screening with Minu Tharoor, English professor at New York University, Rahul Bose talked, often tongue in cheek, sometimes movingly about his passion for acting and cinema.

Rahul Bose on The Japanese Wife…

Q: What was it that attracted you about this script?

A: Well, what’s not to be attracted by it? It was just a wonderful piece of cinema and I can see what stemmed from a piece like this, and I think what she did with Kunal’s short story was heroic, it was wonderful. The only thing that was a stumbling block was I thought I was totally inappropriate to play this guy – so I was terrified.  I didn’t discover this character till 24 hours before we shot the movie – normally it happens a little earlier but in this case I didn’t really get Snehamoy till 3 o’clock-ish the afternoon before shooting,  when I was in the dhoti and kurta with specs and wig and I was cycling around the block in Calcutta where I was staying in Alipore and I knew I didn’t have him.

I think acting, especially in something as delicate as this, is like when you’re switching a radio knob to look for a correct frequency and you know the program you want to listen to is at 99.5 and you don’t get it. You try 4 and you try 6 and you still don’t get it and you feel that you’ve lost it forever, it doesn’t exist. And then suddenly at 99.48 something happens and you suddenly can hear very clearly the song you were looking for, the radio station you were looking for. It’s really a chance – you have to try hard but ultimately it’s a lot to do with chance and I think I got lucky. At least I hope so!”